Places and Persons
Polmaise, Alan
Places and Perso?is PARKMAN AND THE MARTYRS By ALAN POLMAISE UNDER a giant elm at Penetanguishene, on the Ontario shores of Lake Huron, stands a rough granite bearing a plaque with the...
...His bodily endowments were as remarkable as the temper of his mind...
...Here is the setting, or scenario, he unrolls for the staging of his drama: One vast, continuous forest shadowed the fertile soil, covering the land as the grass covers a garden lawn, weeping over hill and hollow in endless undulation, burying mountain in verdure, and mantling brooks and rivers from the light of day...
...They carried their sanguinary conquests and depredations from Quebec to the Carolinas and from the forests of Maine to the western prairies...
...To the last he refused to flinch, and "his death was the astonishment of his murderers...
...The true genesis of the Parkman martyrology is narrated in his account of the advent of LeCaron and the great Champlain at the triple-palisaded town of Caraghouha in 1615...
...His manly proportions, his strength and his endurance, which incessant fasts and penances could not undermine, had always won for him the respect of the Indians no less than a courage unconscious of fear and yet redeemed from rashness by a cool and vigorous judgment...
...You have found them," shouted Malahuk, chief of the Sioux, and with bows and arrows, tomahawk and scalping knife, the fight opened...
...Arrayed in priestly vestments, he stood before his simple altar...
...for nobody can be saved without a good baptism...
...Milway Filion, Jesuit superior general, took his stand with the little group, witness at their request of their final reconciliation...
...All America shook with the fury of their onslaught...
...He came of a noble race—the same from which sprang the English earls of Arundel: but never had the mailed barons of his line confronted a fate so appalling, with so prodigious a constancy...
...The Host was raised aloft...
...Garnier's face was beardless, though he was above thirty years of age...
...Thus Parkman...
...He saw the vision of a vast and gorgeous palace...
...Beside him, in strange contrast, stands his co-laborer, Charles Gamier...
...Men, women and children vied with each other in ingenious malignity...
...All Kentucky was a vacant waste...
...In the south they forced tribute from the subjugated Delawares and, with restless ferocity, pierced the mountain fastnesses of the Cherokees...
...Breboeuf was led apart, and bound to a stake...
...Large enough," replied the priest, "to crucify us all...
...Chabanel came later...
...The Huron-Iroquois peace was a fait-accompli...
...It is not for me to eulogize these Jesuits, but to portray them as they were...
...As he continued to speak, with voice and countenance unchanged, they cut away his lower lip and thrust a red-hot iron down his throat...
...Here stood their devout and valiant chief, and, at his side, that pioneer of pioneers, Etienne Brule...
...but Breboeuf signed the cross, and the infernal siren melted into air...
...and a voice assured him that such was to be the reward of those who dwelt in savage hovels for the cause of God...
...and now, with contented heart, he might depart in peace, for he had said the first Mass in the country of the Hurons...
...they eagerly demanded...
...Nature had given him all the passions of vigorous manhood, and religion had crushed them, curbed them, or tamed them to do her work—like a dammed-up torrent, sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave for the good of man...
...Next they hung around Breboeuf's neck a collar made of hatchets heated red-hot ; but the indomitable priest stood like a rock...
...Now we go hunt moose," said Staats, Iroquois sachem...
...upon which the Iroquois seized him, made him fast to a stake and set fire to the bark that enveloped him...
...On June 29, 1930, the Holy See, with every ancient circumstance of pomp and grandeur and ritual, solemnly proclaimed the canonization of Breboeuf, Lalemant, Jogues, Gamier, Daniel, Goupil and Lalande: poignant acknowledgment of the achievement of one Francis Parkman in retrieving these great names from the obscurity of oblivion...
...Discretion and gentleness mark the amenities of the New England agnostic's difficult understanding of the ascetic life: Signs and voices from another world, visitations from hell and visions from heaven, were incidents of no rare occurrence in the lives of these ardent apostles...
...Parkman, intellectualist and agnostic, becomes Parkman, martyrologist...
...His fellow-missionaries thought him a saint...
...The foremost carried, in full tribal accoutrement, Chief Andre Staats and the five head sachems of the Iroquois confederates, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas...
...A chief then tore out his heart and devoured it...
...After a succession of other revolting tortures, they scalped him...
...They led out Lalemant, that Breboeuf might see him tortured...
...But the promptings of a sleepless conscience urged him to return and complete the work he had begun...
...the worshipers kneeled...
...With scrupulous accuracy the Harvard historian describes the dramatis personae: Breboeuf—that masculine apostle of the Faith—was the Ajax of the enterprise...
...to illumine the moral darkness upon which, during the months of his disastrous captivity, he fondly hoped that he had thrown some rays of light...
...Vast lakes washed its boundaries, where the Indian voyager, in his birch canoe, could descry no land beyond the world of waters...
...He called on God, and the apparitions vanished...
...an ancient iron tomahawk was interred at the foot of the boulder...
...He told the vision to his comrades...
...After hours of desperate fighting, the Iroquois went down to bloody defeat...
...Unnumbered rivers seamed the forest with their devious windings...
...but, reaching to the north, the jealous wilderness still asserts its sway, and, over the ancient sites of Ossossane, Ihonitiria, Caraghouha, Toanche, Cahiague and Contarea, the forest, in grim repose, holds its guard around the lake of the Hurons that glistens in its shadow, and doubles in its mirror, crag, precipice and pine...
...Once more he bent his footsteps toward the scene of his living martyrdom, saddened with a deep presentiment that he was advancing to his death...
...He says: I have striven to reproduce an image of the past with photographic clearness and truth...
...Thus died Jean de Breboeuf, the founder of the Huron mission, its truest hero and its greatest martyr...
...and, in a rage, they cut strips of flesh from his limbs, and devoured them before his eyes...
...With language of stern simplicity Parkman narrates the circumstances of the final holocaust and Huron exodus...
...Death, like a skeleton, sometimes menaced him, and once, as he faced it with unquailing eye, it fell powerless at his feet...
...For purposes of brevity, we confine ourselves to the martydoms of Jogues, Lalemant and Breboeuf...
...Landing in silence, on soil that 300 years before had been saturated with the blood of the two nations in desperate conflict, the chieftains moved to a rendezvous at the foot of a huge blood-red boulder...
...In him an enthusiastic devotion was grafted on an heroic nature...
...Both were of noble birth and gentle nurture...
...They had tied strips of bark, smeared with pitch, about his naked body...
...and sustained by the spirit within him, he was more than equal to it...
...Yet this prolific wilderness, teeming with waste fertility, was but a hunting-ground and a battlefield to a few fierce hordes of savages...
...Parkman's chronicle, The Jesuits in North America, with its savage scenery and savage men, is the penta* teuch, unmatched in wild sublimity, of primitive America...
...Nearly three centuries have elapsed since the Hurons vanished from their ancient seats...
...in the west they exterminated the Eries and the Susquehanna Andastes, and spread havoc and ruin among the tribes of the Illinois...
...He could not study by the smoky lodgefire, among the noisy crowd of men and squaws, with their dogs and their restless, screeching children...
...Isaac Jogues, taken captive by the Iroquois, was led from canton to canton, and village to village, enduring fresh torments and indignities at every stage of his progress...
...Their lives attest the earnestness of their faith, the intensity of their zeal...
...He still held his tall form erect and defiant, with no sign or sound of pain...
...Then their rough voices joined in the hymn of praise, Te Deum Laudamus...
...Redeemed at length, by the humane exertions of a Dutch officer, he repaired to France, where his disfigured person and mutilated hands told the story of his sufferings...
...To Breboeuf, whose deep nature, like a furnace white hot, glowed with the still intensity of his enthusiasm, they were especially frequent...
...When he saw the condition of his superior, he could not hide his agitation, and called out to him, with a broken voice, in the words of Saint Paul, "We are made a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men...
...As the flame rose, he threw his arms upward, with a shriek of supplication to heaven...
...We have come to hunt," answered the Iroquois...
...Breboeuf would not flinch...
...The second craft bore, in stately dignity, Ovide Sioui, grand chief of the Hurons, attended by a sub-chief—both coming all the way from Indian Lorette, beyond Quebec...
...when, seeing him nearly dead, they laid open his breast, and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant an enemy, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage...
...behind him his little band of Christians, the twelve Frenchmen who had accompanied him, and the two who had followed Champlain...
...Together," said Sioui, grand chief of the Hurons...
...He says: The twelfth of August was a day evermore marked with white in LeCaron's calendar...
...To the south may be found the picturesque towns of Orillia, Midland, Barrie and Penetanguishene...
...and they tried another means to overcome him...
...The calumet was lighted and, with slow solemnity, passed from mouth to mouth...
...With none of the bone and sinew of rugged manhood he entered, not only without hesitation, but with eagerness, on a life which would have tried the boldest...
...The kettle was accordingly slung, and the water boiled and poured slowly on the heads of the two missionaries...
...How large was it...
...He detested the Indian life—the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the impossibility of privacy...
...He seemed more concerned for his captive converts than for himself, and addressed them in a loud voice, promising heaven as their reward...
...In the north they desolated Huronia and ravaged the other ancient settlements of the Wyandots...
...and more than once Saint Joseph and the Blessed Virgin were visibly present before his sight...
...The ruins of old Fort Ste-Marie, rich in memories of lofty spiritual devotion and tragic self-renunciation, remain a mute memorial of the virgin wilderness, when, in the vastness of the lonely woodlands, civilized man found precarious harborage at Tadoussac and Quebec and Huronia alone...
...The Iroquois, incensed, scorched him from head to food, to silence him...
...colonists fled to the forts...
...Strangely enough, with the swarming activity and tempo of American life today, Huronia has largely been left untouched...
...What was it like...
...Isaac Jogues was of a character not unlike Gamier...
...They were years crowded with scenes of tragic interest, with marvels of suffering and vicissitude, of heroism and endurance...
...A stone fortalice, set in the heart of ancient Huronia —home and hunting-ground of the largest savage community in America, still raises the mounds of its bastions and ramparts, deep-grown with moss and ferns and clustered o'er with grape-vine long since gone wild...
...Benedict among the rocks of Subiaco...
...The sinister actors in this great drama were the Iroquois—foremost in war, formost in cruelty, foremost in all the savage arts of America primeval...
...whereupon, in the tone of a master, he threatened them with everlasting flames for persecuting the worshipers of God...
...In language of surpassing visualization, Parkman recounts what ensued...
...Demons in troops appeared before him, sometimes in the guise of men, sometimes as bears, wolves or wild-cats...
...Nor were his forbodings untrue...
...This was the beginning of the decline of the Iroquois fighting strength...
...through the centuries hagiography has instanced nothing like it...
...On August 3, 1921, in Huronia Park, to the Penetanguishene shores of Matchedash Bay, came two giant canoes, paddled by neutral Objibwa...
...and had he lived a century or two earlier, he would perhaps have been canonized...
...The brave friar, a true soldier of the Church, had led her forlorn hope into the fastnesses of hell...
...military raids, whisky and debauchery ended the tragedy...
...Yet, Parkman, interpreting the begrimed and worm-eaten parchments of The Jesuit Relations, gave us—almost a hundred years ago—in minute and vivid fidelity, the daily life of this ruined community, its acceptance of the black-robes throughout its thirty-two lodge-towns, and its final cataclysm of horror and blood...
...but here the parallel ends...
...Tradition says that when the Iroquois advanced to give battle, Malahuk, chief of the Ogallalah Sioux, strode forward and said to the Mohawks: "What have you come for...
...Once, when he was among the Neutral Nation, in the winter of 1640, he beheld the ominous apparition of a great cross slowly approaching from the quarter where lay the country of the Iroquois...
...In a village of the Mohawks, the blow of a tomahawk closed his mission and his life...
...Then followed the overwhelming of Huronia by the wild and frenzied Iroquois and the ruin of all their villages...
...One might journey for days together through the twilight forest and meet no human form...
...No man was individually a more potent advocate and factor in arriving at the actual canonization of these saints than the great American and distinguished historian...
...Angels appeared to him...
...Nature had given him no especial force of intellect or constitutional energy, yet the man was indomitable and irrepressible, as his history shows...
...A great part of Canada, of Michigan and of Illinois, besides other portions of the West, were tenanted by wild beasts alone...
...A demon, in the form of a woman, assailed him with the temptation which beset St...
...blood-besmeared savages roamed like wolves among the burning settlements and the black arches of the forest glowed with the fires of death...
...So have we," spoke back Malahuk, "and what animals are you hunting...
...Places and Perso?is PARKMAN AND THE MARTYRS By ALAN POLMAISE UNDER a giant elm at Penetanguishene, on the Ontario shores of Lake Huron, stands a rough granite bearing a plaque with the legend: Commemorating Francis Parkman American Citizen Historian of Huronia Rather colorful that...
...Here, in Huronia, historic and heroic heart of primeval America, for nearly two score years, that is, until the dispersal of the Hurons in 1650, Parkman's sainted apostles carried on their mission...
...and, to the perplexity of the finders, in the solitude of what seems virgin forest, strange secrets are constantly unearthed —huge pits, close packed with human bones, copper kettles, stone implements and iron tomahawks...
...Then he threw himself at Breboeuf's feet...
...Inflated with pride of conquest, the Iroquois crossed the Mississippi and challenged the Sioux to combat...
...Green intervals dotted with browsing deer, the broad plains alive with buffalo, broke the sameness of the woodland scenery...
...In the murk of flaming palisades, Breboeuf and Lalemant fell into the Iroquois clutches...
...Yet he bound himself by a solemn vow to remain to the day of his death...
...We baptize you," they cried, "that you may be happy in heaven...
...A Huron in the crowd, who had been a convert of the mission, but was now an Iroquois by adoption, called out with the malice of a renegade, to pour hot water on their heads, since they had poured so much cold water on those of others...
...Men," was the haughty reply...
...and then a volley of their guns proclaimed the triumph of the faith to the okies, the manitous and all the brood of anomalous devils who had reigned with undisputed sway in these wild realms of darkness...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 22
